Kissing the Dead

The author, shown above (left) with her parents and sisters in the nineteen-seventies, writes of her father’s death, “I was greedy for one last gesture of love, one more moment of physical contact with a man who was never stingy with his affection.”

Courtesy Marisa Silver

He was gone. I heard the final, awful rattle, the ragged, gasping breath that I couldn’t help thinking was full of his angry, determined desire to beat this impossible thing that had happened to him. He’d taken a fall. He’d hit his head. Now he was dead.

When I’d first walked into the hospital room and saw him hooked up to all the machines that were doing his living for him, I’d had to resist my urge to yell at him to GET UP! I was sure that this is what he would have done had our roles been reversed; he would have believed that he could somehow argue, cajole, even berate me into recovery, as if my situation were simply the result of laziness or a lack of will. This was a man who, in his younger days (and in more innocent times), would routinely arrive late to the airport, run out on the tarmac and flag down the plane pulling out of the gate, a guy who’d climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro at seventy, who’d figured out how to produce films with not much more than a few dollars and a roll of duct tape. I’d never known him once to stand on line. When confronted with the prospect, I’d see him crane his neck above the crowd, and watch his face as he determined how he could jump to the head of it. He was not arrogant, or even entitled. But he was not fond of authority in any guise, and he was generally certain that he knew a better way to get things done. He’d spent a lifetime telling me to get up, brush myself off, use my wits, and figure out how to turn a no into a yes. If I had been younger, I might have seen his submission to this latest and last challenge as a kind of hypocrisy. But I was older, and I knew that there were disasters in life that sheer determination could not conquer, and that his bracing early instructions were less practical than metaphorical.

It was such a radically destabilizing moment, that final inhale/exhale of his life. The brute growl, the rumbling vitality of it, made it impossible to believe that there wouldn’t be another breath, and then another still. It was terrifying and upsetting. It also was uncanny in the way things are that you have heard about all your life and then finally experience—seeing the Mona Lisa, say, after knowing it only from reproductions. It is both more and less than you anticipated, and you find yourself trying to understand which is more real, the imagined or the actual. None of us in the room spoke or moved. We barely breathed ourselves. It was as if we were holding that fragile second in which he was both alive and not alive in our hands, cupping time, imprisoning it as we would a butterfly, so that it would not escape. Once we let go, every second, minute, every year that followed would be one in which he was only dead. It was so perplexing, that moment. What were we to do with ourselves in the face of this removal? Did we dare speak? I’ve spent a lifetime trying to arrange words in ways that will distill life, words that will create the cluster of associations necessary to convey the complexity of any lived moment. But I did not know the words that could conjure this strange transformation that had taken place, words that could describe what was taking place inside me. So, instead of speaking, I leaned over, put my lips on my father’s shaved skull, and kissed him.

I was doing it for my own sake. I was greedy for one last gesture of love, one more moment of physical contact with a man who, despite his exhortations against mediocrity and his fierce expectations, was never stingy with his affection. But I did it for him, too, because it seemed to me that the worst thing, worse than the death that I did not yet comprehend, was that he would think I no longer believed in his ability to get himself out of this fix. I was still his daughter, his audience, the one who had delighted in all of his heroic feats. I still owed him my faith in his ability to come out ahead.

Why do we kiss the dead? They cannot absorb the intention of the gesture, but I don’t think that means it’s a purely selfish display. We kiss them because we somehow know that they can feel the transmission of our love, and our deep sympathy for what has befallen them. It’s irrational, of course, this belief that they can subvert the rules of their own end. But death is unreasonable. Confronted with its imminence, the membrane that separates the rational from the irrational ruptures, and we enter the same space we occupy when we surrender to fable and myth. As a loved one flirts with the edge, we pray to powers we might not even believe in, relinquishing skepticism, hoping to open ourselves up to the possibility of miracles. To our urgent demands for certainty, the doctors remind us that they cannot know for sure, that each case is different, and this unknowable percentage, no matter how infinitesimal, opens the door for magic. The territory of dying is one of enchantment. This is why we have tales about the kiss of a prince awakening a princess doomed to a lifelong sleep, why hideous crones turn into beautiful queens. To fend off the hard, irrevocable irrationality of death, we choose to believe in our endless capacity to transcend, or, as my father might have put it, to turn a no into a yes. A violence had been visited on him in the form of his soft, brilliant head coming into contact with an unyielding and uncaring tree. If he could not argue his way out of this fate, I could at least do what we all do when listening to a story of magical transformations or heroic defiance of the odds. I could believe in it.

The sign on my father’s hospital-room door did not bear his name. It read, “Trauma Geranium.” The woman in the room next door was Trauma Hydrangea. Down the hall, Trauma Peony inhabited the nether region of the not quite living but not yet dead. This was a place where time seemed both sped up and attenuated, where doctors and nurses either rushed purposefully about or moved impossibly slowly, as if there were not emergencies literally lying behind every door. The desk nurse was not looking at medical information on her computer screen. She was shopping for shoes, as if she were in a salon, whiling away the time while her nails were drying. A man was openly weeping in the hallway. No one reacted. His pain was such a commonplace that it did not require particular notice, and so he had become invisible.

Those prone bodies—they could have been under the influence of spells. And the same could have been said for the rest of us in this windowless ward dedicated to the traumas of the brain. We were all suspended—doing crossword puzzles, reading wrinkled magazines, giving up on a candy bar halfway through without knowing we had eaten it at all, speaking occasionally and uselessly. “Dad? Dad?” But maybe not useless. Maybe our voices would break the spell. I could look at my watch and notice that only five minutes had passed. I could look again and it would be the following day. We never knew whether to eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner, or if we were hungry at all. Should we sleep? Should we pee? What did our bodies want? Who were we now that my father had turned into a flower? What would he transform into next? And who would we be then?

It was, in a strange way, a marvellous space to inhabit; a space full of marvel. We were susceptible to its abundant mysteries. We were the characters in this story being told. A mother. Three sisters. The beloved sleeping man. And when my father took his last breath, he did what all characters of fable do to defy fate: he became nothing and, in that exact moment, he became something new. Something that required my fidelity in order to exist. I kissed my father to say to this new strange and miraculous presence, I know that you are here.

Marisa Silver’s new novel, “Little Nothing,” was published on September 13th.